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What Standing Rock Protesters Can Learn from Los Gatos Exhibition

John Trudell, speaking at a press conference at Alcatraz during the occupation of 1969-1971. This photograph and others by Ilka Hartmann are on display as part of Cement Prairie, an exhibition about Native Americans in the South Bay. (Photo: Courtesy of Ilka Hartmann)

Now that President Trump has given the go-ahead for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, protest organizers are calling on their supporters from around the country to return to the camps in North Dakota.

The protests at Standing Rock show the power of pan-tribal political organizing. But it’s not the first time members of different tribes have banded together to pursue a political win on the national stage.

You’ll find the first hint on the Facebook page of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe with inspirational photos of John Trudell, a nationally known Native American activist who first came to prominence as the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz, here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alcatraz during the occupation of 1969-1971. This photograph and others by Ilka Hartmann are on display as part of Cement Prairie, an exhibition about Native Americans in the South Bay. (Photo: Courtesy of Ilka Hartmann)

Cement Prairie details how 750,000 Native Americans left their reservations for big cities between 1950 and 1980, the result of a federal policy known as “Urban Relocation.”

While the government helped transplants find schooling and jobs in urban centers, Cement Prairie‘s curator, Amy Long, says the promise of self-improvement came with a presumption. “The government was hoping with relocation that Indians would come here by bus or car and assimilate into the mainstream and the cities,” Long says. “And then they would just kind of disappear with the rest of us.”

The rooms at NUMU are filled with family photos, quilts, drums, and other artifacts that tell of a mass migration to California in the last century. The exhibition’s title, Cement Prairie, derives from the way cities like San Jose stood in concrete contrast to the wide, grassy plains of home. Arriving in California, many Native Americans felt dislocated, alienated and lonely.

The personal is political

Take the story of Al Cross, who left his tribal lands in North Dakota for San Jose in 1960. “A lot of the young people that left came out here, to the West Coast,” Cross says. “They knew where it was good! Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose.

In the 1940s, Al Cross’s dad lobbied to stop a project that would flood large parts of his reservation in North Dakota. Old Lily Wolf made him a beaded blue neck tie ahead of the trip to DC for good luck, but it wasn’t enough to stop the dam. (Photo: Rachael Myrow/KQED)

“What saved me, I think, was meeting with other Indian people,” Cross says. At first, he worked in a soap factory. Eventually, he started going to night school and got a degree at the University of California Berkeley in social welfare. This launched his career as a social worker, working mostly with Native Americans.

At 82 years of age, Cross is one of several transplants, now elderly, featured in the exhibition’s oral testimony video, a collaboration between NUMU and San Jose State’s anthropology department.

Eventually, Native Americans living in California’s urban center found each other. Santa Clara Native American community member Arvine Pilcher says Native Americans gradually developed a sense of cross-tribal unity because of their shared experience out west. “We’ve all become one nation, living in California,” Pilcher says. “We’re not Navajos, Eskimos, Sioux, you know, Nez Perce. I really feel like we’re all one nation.”

Health centers, amateur basketball leagues, regional potlucks and pow wows — these were the building blocks of a new community. But during the political foment of the 1960s, talk turned to how best to protest federal policies and demand reparation.

There were several attempts to occupy Alcatraz, culminating in a 19-month effort led largely by a group of local college students called United Indians of All Tribes. Trudell was the group’s spokesman. “If we’re free, we want the right to make our own decisions,” he says in video footage from one of the many press conferences held on the island at that time. “We don’t want the ‘Great White Father’ making the decision for us.”

In the end, the occupiers didn’t win Alcatraz. But organizer Adam Fortunate Eagle, in the 2001 documentary Alcatraz Is Not an Island, says the protest had positive consequences. “We awoke Indian people individually. We awoke tribes. We awoke the media. We awoke the United States Government,” he says.

The Nixon Administration passed a series of reforms, and, among other things, returned large chunks of reservation lands across the country.

A Native American alter built by Pablo Viramontes of Los Gatos, who also teaches native arts to at-risk youth and people in recovery. This alter draws from multiple tribal traditions, representing the modern unity of Native Americans in the US. (Photo: Rachael Myrow/KQED)

Long says Urban Relocation left a lasting legacy for Native Americans, one aspect of which is showing a united front when standing up for human and civil rights. “They wound up finding each other, and rediscovering their Indianness,” Long says. “Creating what we see today, like what we see at pow wows, and in the cities, and Standing Rock.”

‘Cement Prairie: The History and Legacy of the 1952 American Indian Urban Relocation Program’ is on view at New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) through Sunday, Jun. 25. Details and information here.

Her passion for public radio was born as an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley, writing movie reviews for KALX-FM. After finishing one degree in English, she got another in journalism, landed a job at Marketplace in Los Angeles, and another at KPCC, before returning to the Bay Area to work at KQED.

She spent more than seven years hosting The California Report, and over the years has won a Peabody and three Edward R. Murrow Awards (one for covering the MTA Strike, her first assignment as a full-time reporter in 2000) as well as numerous other honors including from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio Television News Directors Association and the LA Press Club.
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Support is also provided by Yogen and Peggy Dalal, Diane B. Wilsey, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Helen Sarah Steyer, the William and Gretchen Kimball Fund, and the members of KQED